Читать книгу Abandoned - W Clark Russell - Страница 6

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LUCRETIA was trapped! Instead of seeing her husband lying in a bunk, broken, hollow, bandaged, stained, dying, or dead, watched by a nurse, what did she behold? Her husband indeed, and only her husband; erect at a little square table, as healthy in aspect as ever he had shown, a fine figure of a man, amongst the last, one should say, to excite repulsion in a woman who had once owned she loved him, and who had been made one with him in the most sacred of human bonds.

She shrieked; she swallowed, almost choking, a sob of terror and dire astonishment. The unexpectedness of this apparition as she viewed it, the abrupt astounding transmutation of the illusion that had filled her mind as a fact into the fact that confronted her, seemed, after she had screamed, to shock the life out of her limbs, to root her to the deck, to paralyze every function. Then, with the instinct of escape, she turned her head, and her husband sprang to the door.

"No, dear," said he, not without a note of sternness in his voice, not without a shadow of austerity in his gravity; "you belong to me. The law has given you to me. You gave your hand to me before God, who is my witness. You are mine, and shall remain mine, and why not? What has happened to me that this change should have happened to you? Why have you refused to see me? Have I grown loathsome in appearance and manner since we met at the church? Have I by any single deed warranted your contempt and aversion? I love you as I have ever loved you. I am adoring you, my darling, even as I seem to address you in heat. Come to your own, you will find him true!"

He extended his arms to her, and smiled with such a commingling of pathos in the expression as softened the look almost into the tenderness of tears.

"Open the door and let me pass!" she answered. "You are a coward and a villain to have betrayed me as you have, sending a lying rascal to me to represent you as dying, and making me——" her voice broke. She swelled her breast, and cried, "Let me pass! I want to go home."

"You shall return home with me," said he, "but in my own good time."

"You dare not imprison me!" she almost screamed.

"You are here, and here you remain," he replied. "We will not call it imprisonment. When a wife lives with her husband, whether at sea or ashore, she is not his prisoner. She is his companion, and in my case his love."

"Are you really in earnest in keeping me here and taking me away to sea?" she asked, with the very spirit of tragedy firing her fine eyes, and making extraordinarily dramatic the forward-leaning, imperiously inquisitorial posture of her figure.

"I certainly am," he answered bluntly.

She looked at him for a few seconds, and speculation passed from her glowing balls of vision. Her eyes swooned in their upward rolling under the descending lids, and the scarlet of wrath died out of her cheeks into their first pallor of virgin wax. She reeled, and would have fallen; but he caught her, and laid her tenderly in the one bunk of that cabin, supporting her head to remove her hat that he might pillow her, liberating her throat, now kissing, now fanning her, and brooding over her with the passion of a man whose love has been consecrated.

Meanwhile Mr. Featherbridge, who had received his instructions, was executing them. He hailed the waterman to bring his boat alongside, got in, and was rowed ashore, and making his way to the telegraph office he stamped two forms already filled up and handed them to the clerk. The first ran thus—

"To Mrs. Lane,

Chepstow Place,

Bayswater, London.

"Shall remain to nurse Frank. Please send my clothes at once to care of Station Master, Falmouth.

"LUCRETIA, Flying Spur, off Gravesend."

The other telegram was this—

"To Station Master, Falmouth.

"Please receive and hold boxes addressed to my wife to your care.

"FRANCIS REYNOLDS,

"Master Flying Spur, Gravesend."

This was a plot artfully planned and diligently prosecuted. It is not for the chronicler to pronounce upon its morality. His business is to relate, and to leave the reader to judge. But that certificate? Was a third "party" in this scheme in the form of a medical man? No; Mr. Featherbridge, instructed by Captain Reynolds, had called upon a medical practitioner in Gloucester Road and complained of pains in the bowels and general malaise. He protruded a tongue as red as a powder flag; the doctor felt his pulse, which yielded the rhythm of the hammered anvil. The doctor took pen in hand to prescribe, and whilst he cast his eyes upon the ceiling in search of drugs Featherbridge asked him for a sheet of headed paper, on which he feigned to scribble a note with a pencil. This blank sheet he folded once, ready for its square envelope, and pocketed it, and on this sheet in the cabin of the Flying Spur he wrote to the dictation of Captain Reynolds the remarkable and telling certificate which had lured Lucretia to Gravesend and into captivity.

He was rowed aboard, having been absent a little over an hour. It was about five o'clock. At six the tug Deerstalker would be alongside to take the Flying Spur in tow for the Channel. The air was amazingly tranquil. The delicate colour of the October sun sinking low gave the picture of smooth river, and restful ships, and houses ashore, and the melancholy flatness of the Tilbury plains, a hue of warmth that made a summer scene of it. Every flag hung up and down like a streak of paint from the gaff or mast-head of vessels rooted to their buoy or anchor; but the colours fluttered at the staff or gaff of the steamer, mail, or tramp, noble in bulk, or humped in bow, or hogged amidships, or sagged aft where the leaning funnel threatened the demolition of that extremity of the ship. And these filled the horizon of the eye with the motions of life and the colours of commerce.

Mr. Featherbridge climbed the side, and at the gangway found Mr. Vincent Ralland the second mate, a rather fat, warm-coloured, yellow-haired man, in a round coat that made his figure resemble a cup and ball, with a smile of natal origin which might have passed as satirical or cynical had his utterances justified such an assumption.

"The captain's been asking for you, sir," said this man.

"Where is he?" inquired Mr. Featherbridge.

"In the cabin, I think, sir."

"See all ready for the tug! I shall be on deck shortly;" and Mr. Featherbridge went below.

As he entered the cabin Captain Reynolds came out of a berth on the port side. It was not the compartment into which Featherbridge had introduced Lucretia. The door of that berth was closed and locked, and Reynolds had the key of it in his pocket, and it would remain locked until the ship was fairly under way in tow of the tug.

"Did you send the wires?"

"Yes, sir."

"Featherbridge," said the captain, extending his hand, "I am extremely obliged to you for your part in this unhappy business. I am the more obliged because I know that much that you have undertaken on my behalf is in conflict with your views."

"I am glad to have served such a friend as you have been to me, Captain Reynolds," said Mr. Featherbridge. "But Mrs. Reynolds will hate me like poison, and I shall be ashamed to meet her. And yet, what more proper than that a wife should live with her husband?"

"She fainted," said Captain Reynolds, "and was so long in coming to that I was alarmed. She cries silently, which goes to my heart, for God knows it is not in me to give her cause for a single tear. She shall not have reason to complain of my honour, though I have proved treacherous in my effort to possess that which I lawfully own and loyally love. She shall be as a virgin to her husband, but under his protection and within the embrace of his eyes, which must suffice until the woman's heart breaks through the woman's perversity, and the higher form of chastity asserts itself in union."

These may seem flowery thoughts and shining words in the mouth of a captain in the Merchant Service; but we shall see, as we progress, that Reynolds was a man of reflection and reading; one who had spent a great portion of his leisure in studies outside those to which he was courted by his profession. He had read well into the poets, and had followed science in some of the most eloquent of its exponents, such as Faraday, Tyndall, and Kelvin, was not without some knowledge (for conversation) of sculpture, painting, and music. He was mainly self-educated, and therefore well-grounded, and indeed he had made but a small impression on Lucretia if his fascinations had been limited to his person.

Meanwhile in the captain's cabin sat or stood the captive Lucretia. The husband's hand was visible in the furniture of this sea apartment. The bunk—the one bunk—was cosy with eiderdown quilt, soft pillow, new hair mattress. A row of pegs supplied the absence of a wardrobe for the storage of skirts, jackets and the like. A toilet-table under the round scuttle with which this bedroom was illuminated bore fiddles for the preservation of a powder-box, bottles of rosewater, eau-de-Cologne, and other dressing delicates. On the table were ivory hair-brushes and knick-knacks too commonplace to catalogue. Several pots of plants in flower sweetened the atmosphere.

Lucretia had ceased to weep; her face had taken a hard look of rage and alarm. She gazed about her, but entirely missed the symptoms of marital affection through the resentment and indignation she was consumed with. Had the cabin been lighted by a port-hole big enough to run a gun through Lucretia would not have thrown herself into the Thames. She had threatened poison to her trembling mother outside, but she had not had a drop in the room, and she was a conspicuous figure amongst those people of this world who are the very last to lay violent hands upon themselves. No doubt she would have made a brave dash for liberty could she have found an exit: descended a rope-ladder, say, or jumped a fall of fifteen feet into a boat; but she had no idea of destroying herself, and perhaps her husband knew enough of her character to form an opinion under this head. For would he otherwise have allowed a brand-new pair of scissors to repose in a fiddle on the toilet-table? since even a bare bodkin suffices in the hands of those who will not fardels bear, not to mention husbands.

What a honeymoon was this for Lucretia! Her nostrils quivered, her lips worked as she vowed that if ever she was permitted to return she would pursue her treacherous husband and the scoundrel Featherbridge to the uttermost recesses of the law. And still she gathered from the character of her sea bedroom, from the absence of all instruments for purposes of navigation, and of all hints of a masculine presence, that she was to dwell alone, and from this perception her cold, chaste, passionless spirit sucked in a little comfort. What would her mother think when she came to learn the truth? Unfortunately, Lucretia felt secretly convinced that Mrs. Lane would approve on the whole of Frank's stratagem as rescuing both herself and her daughter from a most anomalous and gossip-breeding position. It was not as though Captain Francis Reynolds had kidnapped Lucretia Lane, a disdainful, handsome young woman, a prize not only for beauty, but for money. He had beguiled his own wife into his arms! The fittest of all harbours for her to bring up in, the safest and surest casket in which to deposit the jewel of her life.

This sort of reasoning would occur to Lucretia no doubt, but not in a convincing way. She might have been agitated by such reflections but not persuaded, as a sea-fowl when the waves pass under it is not carried forward, but moves up and down. She had no fear of violence; she very well knew that she was deeply and devotedly loved. But she burnt with wrath when she considered how she had been tricked and trapped. And again she wept, and sometimes wildly stepped the narrow-carpeted space of deck, and sometimes paused to listen, with vulgar surmises occasionally breaking in: such as, would Frank keep her locked up until she consented? Did he mean to keep her throughout the voyage, or did he merely intend to terrify her into the submission of a wife? If so, then persistent obstinacy must result in his sending her ashore before the ship was fairly away from England. Where would she be allowed to take her meals? Would she be permitted to go on deck?

Hark! What noise was that? Merely the sounds of the helm, the scrape of the wheel-chain, the jar of an old-fashioned system of steering.

She looked through the scuttle, and perceived that the ship was in motion. The pilot was in charge, and the captain was at large. Lucretia heard the key turned in her cabin door, and Reynolds entered. He looked at her wistfully and said—

"We have started. The voyage has begun, Creeshie. Though you may not forgive me for a little, I am happy. It is as it should be, as your mother could wish it to be, as you, dearest, will soon admit it ought to be."

"Do you mean to land me?" she exclaimed, with fire in her eyes.

"No."

"Do you intend to carry me all the way to the South American port you are sailing to?"

"Yes, and back again."

"You are a black-hearted wretch!" she exclaimed, working her hands hysterically. "If I live I'll punish you!"

"The voyage will do you good," he said, in an easy voice of good-nature, almost cheerful. "This is a stout little ship, and in her day she was a proud one. You have the figure for a rolling deck, and the eyes for a tropic calm."

"You are no gentleman!" she exclaimed, frowning at him. "Would any gentleman treat a woman as you are treating me?"

"Talk to me as my wife and I will listen to you," he responded. "What good will scolding do? I am not changed. I am as I was when we first met, and as I was when you said "Yes" to me, and we kissed, and you gave me a rose from your breast. You cannot forget such things! I have you, and I will keep you, and you shall thank me yet, Creeshie."

"I demand to be sent on shore!" she exclaimed, lifting her foot and bringing it down with an angry slap on the deck.

"Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder," said Captain Reynolds. "Why should I divorce you? We love and we lose, and the poet tells us that it is better to love and lose than never to love at all. I love you, and I don't mean to lose you. No, Crish, that ring has a meaning as deep as your life and mine, which are one."

She passionately seized the wedding-ring on her finger as though she would tear it off. But she did no more than that. In the minute of silence that followed he grew stern, and looked at her gloomily and even forbiddingly, as though he would have her know that he was her lord, and that one of her vows was obedience, which formed the third of the trinity which included love and honour; but if temper had not blinded her she would have seen that this look was but a mask; indeed, the glow of his love coloured the whole man, and rendered her conduct inexplicable; for we recognize the passion of chastity in the vows of the nun, but it is impossible to interpret precisely that quality in the vows of the bride.

"You will understand," said he, "now that the ship is under way that you can come and go, and do what you please. This cabin has been prepared for you, and for you only. You can take your meals alone or with me at the cabin table as you choose."

In all this he was unconsciously answering the questions which had run in her head before he arrived. He proceeded—

"You have but to name a desire, and if it's in the power of the sea-life to gratify it, you shall not be disappointed. You have nothing to fear. If you can find the elements of happiness in you, you shall not miss in me a solid foundation for the erection of your temple."

He viewed her steadfastly whilst her eyes glowed at him with indignation and scorn, and, rounding on his heel, he walked out.

Her mind fell into a hurry of desperate thought. The idea possessed her to write a letter—she gazed about her for writing materials; nothing of the sort was visible. She was very ignorant of the sea, had some vague fancy of a passing boat, of throwing a letter into it and begging the people to post it. But to whom should she write? there was but one—her mother. And what could her mother do, even if she proved willing to separate them now that they were together?

Her reflections grew pale with something like despair. What a base trick to play her! Helplessness added fuel to wrath. To bring her away, too, without clothes! How on earth was she to manage with only the things she had on, when she had understood from Frank—yes, she called him Frank to herself—that the outward passage might run into three, or even four months; for the ship was bound round the Horn, and from the Thames to Poposa is a long navigation for an old-fashioned, composite sailing ship, hedged about by those conditions of calms and head winds, and long heaving-to's, with the arrest of ice and other familiar causes of delay which take no part in the voyage of the steamer.

She determined to go on deck. Her cabin had been a prison, and was an exasperation to her. And now she resolved, even before she quitted her sleeping-room, to adopt and express a posture of mind that should prove a death-blow to her husband's expectations. We shall presently see what she meant to do.

The cabin was lighted; a broad flame of oil in a glass globe swung pulses of radiance through the atmosphere to the bulkheads, and the sheen rippled in bright wood, in cutlery, and crockery, and glass. Stars of the evening trembled in the skylight. It was hard upon seven o'clock. The cloth was spread for a meal in the cabin. The servant, who no doubt had received instructions from the captain, stepped up to Lucretia with a mighty fine air of respect, and asked if he should serve tea to her. Yes; her throat was a little dry with tears and constriction and angry words, and she waited, not seated, standing beside the table, whilst the cabin servant went forward to the galley. Occasionally sounds broke from the interior, noises of straining like to the groans delivered by old furniture at midnight. This was a very new scene of life to the lady, and she looked about her with petulant disgust, with a ceaseless complaining of heart that she should have been betrayed by a most ignoble trick into a captivity that was really worse than gaol, as the sage pointed out, for in a ship you are not only locked up, but you stand to be drowned.

Whilst she waited for a cup of tea, Mr. Featherbridge came down the companion-steps on his way to his berth. He started at sight of her, and averted his face as he passed. She followed him with a gaze of withering intensity and dislike. She looked a handsome figure in her hat and jacket; the oil flame glorified her hair; it gave a delicacy to her extreme pallor; it accentuated the dark depth of her eyes, and lighted a little star of beauty in each. Why on earth could not this woman be commonly human, and take her husband for better or for worse? It was Fontenelle who proposed the erection of statues to beautiful women. He would have gone further; built an immense hall, in which figures in wax of the beautiful women of the country apparelled in the fashion, would be collected. In such a vast and engaging museum Lucretia would have made no inconsiderable show.

The servant arrived with the tea-pot and milk, and placed some thin bread and butter and cake on the table. She filled a cup, and sipped it, standing. As she sipped, her husband came out of his cabin.

"I am glad to see you are taking some refreshment," said he, looking at her with an appearance of moving affection.

She held her eyes off him, and curled her lip, and kept silence.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," he continued briskly, as though he would have his good-humour shear, as the cutwater of a ship the wrathful billow, through her rage and resentment, "that I sent a wire to your mother to forward your clothes to Falmouth, where we shall call for them."

Her answer, without looking at him, was a sneer, and she turned her back upon him and drank her tea. It was pretty clear now that she had made up her mind not to speak to him, to be to him a shape without a spirit, a statue without a soul, a lighthouse without a lantern, a moon without glory—a something of which the absence would be a blessing in comparison with the discomfort of its presence.

He told the servant to light the lamp in Mrs. Reynolds' cabin, and passed on deck. In a few minutes she put down the cup and went up the steps. Land and river were clothed in the early October night. The ship was floating restfully in the wake of the tug, whose shape was a shadow, and whose line of smoke as it rose almost perpendicular from the funnel was often full of the spangles of the furnace. There was majesty in the figure of the ship, in the solemn lifting of her masts crossed with yards symmetrically braced, each glimmering with its length of pale canvas; there was poetry in the lonely figure of the helmsman at the wheel, the incarnation of that spirit of sentience which to the meditative eye is visible in the motions of the compass. Gleams of light, falling one knew not whence, swarmed capriciously in the water; yellow sparks dotted the dark shores, and here and there a lighted house touched the gloom with a misty dash of radiance, like phosphor in brine; visionary forms of ships passed; the coloured signals of the sea in red and green and white shone in the gloom, or hovered over the dark breast of river like lights about a swamp, or the tremulous meteors of the highway, which affright the clown, and hurry him along in sweat to report a lie, namely, a ghost.

Lucretia moved warily about the deck, giving her husband a wide berth. He stood in conversation with the pilot, but whilst she continued above he held her in the tail of his eye. There was a sheen of lamplight and starlight in the atmosphere, and if the expression of the face could not be read the behaviour of the eyes could be followed. Captain Reynolds observed the pilot watching Lucretia.

"She is my wife," he said.

"Oh yes, I thought as much," answered the Trinity House man, whose square trunk, compact of coat and shawl, lightly swayed on rounded legs under skirts that half concealed them. And to himself he added, "She may be his wife, but she don't seem much of a companion."

The evening was perfectly tranquil; the river glass-smooth. A large star or two that went in the water with the ship, hung like a prism of white light, but the movement of the vessel made a little wind, and the threads of hair on Lucretia's brow danced to it as though they were Coleridge's summer leaf in an entranced night on a topmost bough, and she felt a bit chilly. She stepped from the side at which she had been looking at the shore and occasionally glancing at the man who conversed with her husband, and going to the sailor at the wheel asked who that person was who was with the captain.

"The pilot, mum," answered the fellow.

"Does he remain in the ship?" inquired Lucretia.

"No, mum. I expect he'll go ashore at Deal."

She said, "Thanks," and walked to the ship's side again, where she debated whether she should appeal to the pilot to help her to return home. But the sense of the absurd flavoured her anger; she was not without a good and even a strong understanding, and the ridiculous was inevitably the inherent condition of every emotion. For mind, like matter, has the power of selecting its colour, and not the most tempestuous mood could be hers without its taking the hue of the imbecility of the position in which she had partly placed herself and partly been placed. It was not conceivable that the pilot would meddle with what he might regard as a twopenny quarrel betwixt husband and wife, some jibbing perhaps on her part in jealousy. At all events, she reflected that it would be impossible for her to explain to a rough seaman, such as a pilot, her reasons for declining to live with Captain Reynolds whom she would be bound to admit was her husband. Nor was Lucretia a person to court discomfiture. So, with a shudder, contrived partly by the temperature, partly by disgust and a sense of helplessness, she returned to her cabin and closed the door.

Reynolds' appeal to her through the medium of the cabin furniture lay in other directions than that of the toilet-table. Against a bulkhead were ranged some hanging book-shelves, and had she condescended to examine their burden she would have found the volumes by her favourite authors, and those which were new to her were such as she would have chosen. This alone proved that Reynolds' scheme to kidnap her had been long preconcerted, and that he regarded the sequel as a certain triumph to him. She sat in an armchair as comfortable as the one in which Miss Ford had been seated whilst Lucretia dressed for her marriage, but remained clothed as for the deck or shore. In about half an hour some one knocked on the door.

She cried quickly, "Who's that?"

"I'm John, mum."

"What do you want, I say?"

On this he opened the door and told her that the captain had sent him to inquire what she would like for supper. She was again thirsty, but answered—

"I want nothing."

He stared at her with a mind that lagged heavily in the rear of his eyes, and said—

"There's chicken and cold lamb and cold boiled beef, and claret and sherry—what will it please you to take?"

"Have you got any soda-water?"

"Yes, mum."

"Bring me some claret and soda-water!"

"Yes, mum. And what to eat?"

"Cut a couple of thin ham sandwiches!"

He went out, and the moment he was gone she fell into a rage and began to cry. It was evident that she was the only woman in the ship. There was no stewardess. To think of being waited on and perhaps nursed if she should be sea-sick by a tarry young Jack in a sleeved waistcoat, who breathed Spanish onions, and who was so awed by the sight of her that, like people who cannot work and talk at the same time, he neglected his business in viewing her! The position was to be summed up in the old Frenchman's saying concerning a religious drama, "C'est une chose assez risible, mais il manque des rieurs."

When the sandwiches had been brought to her, she locked the door. Her husband, however, did not trouble her. There was no motion as yet in the ship: the cabin deck seemed as fixed a platform as the land. Sometimes she heard the voices of men talking as they ate at table. The tiller chains overhead occasionally strained, and a voice of lamentation sometimes proceeded from some timber weary of its obligation of cohesion, or from the cargo underfoot. Presently she looked at the time and found the hour half-past nine. She wound up her watch, and feeling extravagantly exhausted, what with her journey, what with the amazing passions her betrayal had lighted in her, and what with the tears she had shed, idle and most unworthy tears, she resolved upon taking some rest; so she removed her hat and jacket and got into the bunk, otherwise fully apparelled, and covered herself with the light eider-down quilt. It was a coffin of a bedstead, something very removed from all her experiences of going to rest at night; but novelty was not to negative the commands of Nature, and in ten minutes she was sleeping peacefully.

All through the night the ship was towed down the river into the opening breast of ocean, where the land to starboard rounds into the Channel; but when, next day, a little forest of masts which shadowed the horizon abreast of Deal in delicate pencils, was hove into view, a south-west breeze sprang up and a small swell came rolling along under it, and the Flying Spur began to drop curtseys to the mother whose child she was. A south-west wind tarnishes the brightness of the sky and is often a wet breeze. It may lock a sailing-ship up in the Downs when she is outward bound, and the tug that was pulling the Flying Spur was hailed, and her master informed by Mr. Featherbridge, who shouted to him from the starboard cathead, that the ship would bring up. Which she did in due course, abreast of Deal Castle, and the pilot went ashore.

Now, at the hour of breakfast, John had knocked on Lucretia's door and found her up. He had received her orders, and taken a tray to her. She was indeed pale, but looked the fresher and the better for many hours of profound oblivion. The sea was then smooth, and the ship floated steadily after the tug. The anchor had been let go shortly before one o'clock, and the tide had canted the vessel somewhat athwart the swell. She rolled as well as pitched, not, it is true, heavily, but with a behaviour that could have been hardly deemed nursing by a sensitive stomach. It was breezing pleasantly for homeward bounders, and tacks-and-sheetsmen of all rigs blew with the old moaning of the sea in their lifting white breasts through the Gulls, past anchored ships looking withered as winter pines, with here and there a gaunt steam tramp yearning through wide nostrils at the swell, now breaking into a wet flash of red light as she rolled, now soaring with balloon-round bows, now immodestly kicking up her heels in her can-can of the water, to the shameless revelation of the blades of her propeller. Dirty clouds, like smoke, were scattering up from France, and at times slapped a shower into the eye.

"If it was in the east," said Captain Reynolds to the mate, "I should consider this berth good for six weeks. If Mrs. Reynolds comes on deck and sees that town close aboard, there'll be trouble."

His reference was to Deal, which lay abreast, with the foam of the breaker snaked along the base of the slope of grey shingle like a mighty hawser of silver wire. The church spire stretched its vane to the flash of the noon: windows sparkled in terraces: in the foreground were shapes of boats on the pebbly acclivity, and the green land soared to the giant Foreland, with its tower of splendour by night, and its majesty of austere white rampart by day.

It was the dinner hour, and the meal was served below, and the captain and Mr. Featherbridge repaired to the table, leaving the second mate to watch the ship, and John went to Lucretia's door to knock and inquire what she would be pleased to have for dinner.